>"but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value."
You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.
The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.
Precisely. My anecdote is little comfort to a platform looking to extract value from its users by targeting ads at them.
But it's better than nothing. At least I'm sticking around for the opportunity for them to someday extract value from me. If they didn't have this hook, I'd abandon the site completely. Compare that to something like MySpace in its heyday, which never had anybody's real life social network on there in any meaningful sense. Absolutely nothing to keep them there, and leave they did.
You do a good job of demonstrating how Facebook has real, practical value for social lives.
The problem is with the commercial value. The better the user-experience, the worse the commercial value. Can the worlds of social and commercial value co-exist, over lengths of time as long as 20 years? I'm not sure.